Marius didn’t want to say a word. This was the voice that had lulled him into calm compliance all those centuries ago inside that oak tree. This was the voice that had confessed secrets to him which had given him hope that he might survive that night to live in a new way. He only wanted for Teskhamen to go on.

“And then I saw your life,” said Teskhamen, “your life, blazing in the images you yielded to me. I saw your glorious house in Rome, the magnificent temples before which you’d worshipped, with all those pure and lofty columns, and brightly painted marble gods and goddesses so splendidly realized, and those colored rooms in which you’d lived and studied and dreamed and laughed and sang and loved. It wasn’t the wealth, surely you understand me. Not the gold. Not the glittering mosaics. I saw your libraries, I saw and heard your quick-witted and curious companions, I saw the full blooming power of your experience, the life of a cultured Roman, the life that had made you what you were. I saw the beauty of Italy. I saw the beauty of fleshly love. I saw the beauty of ideas. I saw the beauty of the sea.”

A shock passed through Marius but he remained silent.

Teskhamen paused, eyes still fixed on the distant surf. His eyes returned to Marius. He looked past him for a moment and smiled at Daniel, who was listening as if rapt.

“I had never fully understood till that moment,” said Teskhamen, “that we are the sum of all we’ve seen and all we’ve appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you’d read. You were the sum and the fount of what you’d cherished and chosen to abide and all you had loved.”

He left off talking.

Nothing had changed in the night.

Behind them the sparse traffic of early morning moved on the Avenida Atlântica. And the voices of the city rose and subsided beneath the hushed voice of the sea.

But Marius was changed. Changed forever.

“Tell me what happened,” Marius pressed. The intimacy of that long-ago blood exchange in the oak shimmered in his mind. “Where did you go? How did you survive?”